SPACE: Away from the World & Back

Forty miles north of Antigua, it was 3:50 a.m.. May 28, 1959. From the bridge and foredeck of the stubby U.S. Navy fleet tug Kiowa, about 25 officers and crewmen gazed at the tropical sky in awe and anxiety. What they saw was a momentous event in the history of man’s determination to conquer space.

Lieut. Joseph E. Guion, skipper of Kiowa, and Lieut, (j.g.) Raymond E. Foy, a Navy frogman, described the sight. Said Guion: “It looked like an extremely large shooting star, very white and blinking. It was a little sun falling down.” Said Foy: “The light was a lot more intense than the moon. It was almost painful to look directly at it.” The meteor flared through the sky, disappeared behind a cloud bank, blazed forth below. It slowed down, dimming its light and blooming two parachutes, dropped into the sea about five miles from Kiowa. This was what the tug, along with a pair of escort destroyers, had been waiting for. Kiowa pitched on at flank speed through heavy seas, arrived at its destination about 25 minutes later, sent frogmen over the side. Later, she radioed a professionally laconic message to Florida’s Cape Canaveral, 1,500 miles away, from which the bright meteor had been shot. The message:

ABLE BAKER PERFECT. No INJURIES OR OTHER DIFFICULTIES.

Able and Baker were female monkeys, Able a rhesus and Baker a squirrel monkey. From Cape Canaveral, in the nose cone of a Jupiter missile, they had soared 360 miles into space before being plucked from the sea. Their journey beggared imagination, for Able and Baker were the first living creatures to travel through space and return from it alive.

Able and Baker entered and left space at a portentous earthly moment. Just a day earlier Statesman John Foster Dulles had been buried on the date set, and broken, by Russia’s Nikita Khrushchev as the deadline for the Western powers to desert West Berlin. Now the Big Four foreign ministers were returning to Geneva, where they had been trying to get off the diplomatic ground for three weeks. The trip of Able and Baker had meaning to the Geneva conference. A Russian dog named Laika had been the first living animal to orbit through space, and there she died. Able and Baker, labeled “U.S.A.,” traveled beyond the atmosphere—and lived. In the Russian-U.S. race for outer space, there was no such thing as continued supremacy.

The Able-Baker flight opened vast reaches for human attainment in biology and medicine (see SCIENCE). But far beyond that lay a plain but wondrous fact: if a pair of monkeys, subject to the same physical stresses as man, could return safely from space, so could man. The first human to break the chains of the planet might be named Glenn or Carpenter or Schirra or Shepard or Cooper or Grissom or Slayton. These were the U.S. Astronauts, one of them to be selected as their nation’s first space traveler. But whoever the man who returns from space, the way had been broken for him by a monkey named Able and another called Baker.